Abstract
This chapter highlights the possible benefits of applying the social emotional learning model to play strategies for hospitalized children as a leverage to promote children's adaptive coping responses and development. Social and emotional learning can be viewed as a process of developing and using those skills required for identifying and regulating emotions, essential in maintaining a sense of self-identity, fostering positive relationships, feeling and displaying empathy for others, making choices, finding ways to solve problems and achieve personal and collective goals. Although the study regarding this cluster of life-evolving skills and its developmental implications has been mainly focused on the school context, in this chapter, the authors aim to present fruitful application to the hospital context, where social and emotional competence may support children when coping with a stressful phase of their lives; according to this perspective, a significant emphasis will be placed on promoting a systemic approach that encourages several factors for promoting children' adjustment.
TopBackground
Children with their families face several stressors during admission to a hospital ward or intensive care unit, even more, if the prolonged hospitalization period is extended.
Receiving a diagnosis and eventually being hospitalized is a challenging occurrence to deal with: all of the known habits collapse, and it is like being thrown into an undisclosed reality to decode, solve and manage to adapt (Pollack et al., 1994; Rokach, 2016). Such a new reality can be accompanied by functional impairments related to the physical, social, emotional and cognitive domains due not only to the diagnosis itself but also to the consequences of the medical procedures, changes in the social relationships, and limitations to the personal independence (Nijhof et al., 2018; Parsapour et al., 2011).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Play: Physical or mental intrinsically motivated activity eventually beneficial for engaging children in enjoying the new learning.
Resilience: Ability to adaptively recover from stressful experiences and trauma.
Emotion Regulation: Ability to manage, effortfully, emotional experiences resulting from life experiences.
Socio-Emotional Learning: Cluster of skills related to emotional and relational growth.
Coping: Adaptive strategies activated to face and deal with emotional and interpersonal difficulties.
Child Development: Functional growth process through which children acquire perceptual, motor, cognitive, emotional, and social competencies.
Relational Competence: Ability to manage and engage in positive relationships with others.